For one, the Genesis project was about making habitable worlds from otherwise dead and barren ones, not so much about creating life. In fact, life forms were generally considered an unfortunate side effect if you saw the movie.

Regarding the game specifically, unless they put some kind of Spore creature creator into the mix as well, would you rather planets be mostly barren, or wonder why the same species of brown rabbit has inhabited the last 1,028 planets you've visited, because it would be impossible to put a unique creature set to every generated world.

I wish you could just disable comments on screenshots. People are still too busy looking for stupid reasons to bash the game to just enjoy the damn picture.

They took shortcuts in development and it was deployed before it should have been, so yeah, it caused the worlds it created to eventually break down and age rapidly. Perhaps not the best choice of name for their world generator, but I have a feeling it was named more for the spirit behind it, less the horrible malfunctions =p